


The Departed

by sothisiswhatsnext



Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: Blood, Hurt/No Comfort, I accidentally write over 1300 words because I got a song stuck in my head, Knife Violence, allusion to self harm, things that wilde doesnt deserve happen to wilde
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 20:28:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24791587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sothisiswhatsnext/pseuds/sothisiswhatsnext
Summary: Two scenes, from the time in which the infection was running rampant, and before Wilde gathered his team.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 23





	1. No Time for Second Chances

**Author's Note:**

> Titles from "For the Departed" by Shayfer James.  
> I got two lines stuck in my head, and somehow ended up with over 1300 words.  
> Cheers to Charlie for proofing.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oscar isn’t the kind of man to believe in miracles, impossibilities, whatever you want to call it. But the ragged piece of paper in his pocket seems determined to prove him wrong.

The streets of London are surprisingly empty, for the center of an invasion. Newspapers half-pasted in windows as people tried to secure businesses while fleeing flap in the late afternoon breeze.

Oscar Wilde strolls down the avenue, hands shoved in the pockets of a shabby coat.

He looks nothing like the man who showed up in Hamid’s apartment six months ago. Dressed in drab clothes, with a shapeless hat shoved over shorn hair, and dark circles carved under his eyes, Oscar is closer to a specter, wandering these abandoned streets.

He isn’t sure exactly what he’s looking for. Something impossible, maybe.

It isn’t true—of course it isn’t. Sasha went to Rome, and vanished, with the rest of them.

She’s not here, in London, at the center of the infection, sending him a letter through the Harlequins. She can’t be. She _can’t_.

Oscar isn’t the kind of man to believe in miracles, impossibilities, whatever you want to call it. But the ragged piece of paper in his pocket seems determined to prove him wrong.

He fights with this hope with every step. He knows he should turn back, that even being here is a huge risk. And the other side of him, the reason he’s here at all, whispers back:

There’s nothing at all to lose.

And so he continues on his wander through the empty streets, trying not to think about what he’s going to do when he finds what he’s looking for.

\---

Oscar has peeled hastily-nailed boards from a door to shelter for the night when he notices it.

Nothing he would have seen if he wasn’t used to that pattern of movement. Those flashes in shadows at the edges of his vision, gone by the time he turns his head.

But he does see.

Because he sees, he knows to watch for knives.

And because he’s watching, he’s able to throw himself out of the way when a flash of dark metal whirls through the air towards him.

He lands heavily, knocking his shoulder against the wooden floor. The metallic cuff on his wrist rings when his arm clatters against the ground.

Oscar swears colorfully.

A figure emerges from the shadows, with a silhouette so familiar he cuts off in the middle of a particularly intricate French phrase.

“Alright, mate,” Sasha says, with a twisted grin that doesn’t fit her face.

Her face… over which snake layers of cerulean veins. They’re all that’s keeping her upright, Oscar notes, by the sunken texture of her skin, showing bone in places.

But beneath that, it _is_ Sasha.

Sasha, who’s advancing on him with murder in her blue-stained eyes.

Oscar scrambles to his feet, fumbling with the latches to his cuffs. He still hasn’t been sleeping much, but after a few months, maybe it’s enough. He hopes.

It isn’t Sasha, he knows, and that fact is made crystal clear by the slow motion with which she draws another dagger. Her steps are slow, measured, too close to a prowl for comfort.

Until she lunges forward, and Oscar doesn’t scramble back fast enough.

The blade catches on the ridge of his eyebrow, skipping past his eye to catch again at his cheekbone, and tears down, through the side of his mouth, until it slips off the edge of his chin.

The thing that used to be Sasha doesn’t stop. It stabs again, knife seeking his lifeblood. Oscar, stunned, clamping a hand to the bloody side of his face, dodges with more luck than anything else.

He finally clicks the latches open, fingers slippery with blood, and the antimagic cuffs clatter to the floor.

Dregs of power leap to his lips. It’ll have to be enough.

Oscar picks up the string of invectives that froze in his mouth when he first saw the Sasha-thing, spinning it out until language dances on the blood he spits. Blistering power spills out of him along with the words.

It starts as embers. The Sasha-thing looks down at its coat when the fabric starts to smolder, confused.

It goes further than he could ever expect.

It goes up in flames.

Through the inferno that was once his friend, Oscar sees clarity return to Sasha’s eyes, colored by confusion, but not pain. When her eyes widen as if in shock, and she smiles, he doesn’t know why, and he wonders.

Until the fire dies, in the sudden way typical of arcane flames, and charred bones clatter to the floor, amidst his cuffs and his blood.

Wilde collapses to his knees, curling in on himself, pressing his hands to the bloody half of his face.

He stays there for a long time.

\---

The first thing Oscar Wilde does after he leaves London is bury Sasha, for what he will eventually learn is the second time.

The second thing is turn all his energy towards his search for any information on the infection.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Per usual, I went "you know what might be cool and is vaguely supported by canon," then things escalated.


	2. Bourbon, Blood, and Backward Glances

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s been three painful, exhausting months.

It’s been three painful, exhausting months. The line carved down his face isn’t stitched up anymore, but it still hurts when it rains. He’s picked up a habit of running his fingers along the ragged scar as he thinks. It probably isn’t a healthy habit, by the way that too causes twinges of pain, but he doesn’t care.

Maybe he deserves the pain, for what he did in that building.

Three months of digging through papers, of barely sleeping. Of trying so hard to treat people as pieces of meat, walking and talking but already gone.

Of burying the loneliness that causes, burying any worries for his—were they ever his? He likes to think they were, even if he was always hiding behind jobs and wordplay—team in work.

The clock on the mantle chimes twice, and Wilde looks up from the missives he’s been staring at for the past half hour. His cuffs, now cobbled shut, clink as he shoves his hands through his still-short hair. He isn’t sure he picked out anything.

He sighs, eyes catching on the half-drunk glass of whiskey sitting next to his inkwell.

With how the night has been going, that might wake him up. He scoffs a breath—something that might once have followed a sardonic grin, but now screams weary acceptance—and picks up the glass.

Wilde raises the glass to the clock, toasting it silently with what has replaced his quicksilver smile, and tosses back the drink.

Ink-slick fingers slip as he lowers the glass from his lips, and, with a crash, it shatters into jagged shards. Dregs of whiskey spill over the papers strewn across his desk.

Panic spikes through him, sending his heart stuttering.

He can’t lose these papers.

Frantically, Wilde tries to clean the desk, shoving glass aside to reach the drops of amber liquid. The whiskey has already soaked into the thin sheets, smudging the ink and melting the pages together.

All he manages to achieve is handfuls of sharp glass cutting into his flesh.

No, no, no-

He drops the shards, which ring against the table. Red smears join the black and amber on the flimsy pages.

Blood dripping through his fingers, cursing, his mind flashes to the warmth of magical healing. That path ricochets to Azu, and Zolf, before he cuts it off. The last flare of magic heat he felt caused enough harm.

He doesn’t let himself think about Azu.

And Zolf–he has his own work, he knows that from Curie, and since he doesn’t have any actual leads… No. It’s better Zolf stays away.

Never mind he’s the only thing left of the world Wilde used to know.

Never mind that he’s just lost weeks of work with a slip of his fingers, and all he wants to do is sleep, or sob.

Wilde does neither. He picks the glass out of his hands, wincing each time, and wraps each finger tightly—he still needs to hold a quill.

And Oscar Wilde, with the clock chiming three hours past midnight, gets back to work.


End file.
